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The purpose of this paper is to merge service and product quality concepts as well as problem-solving capabilities and relationship satisfaction into an integrative model and empirically test it in business-to-business (B2B) context.

Hypothesis testing was performed using a structural equation model based on a LISREL approach applied to a sample of 1,218 industrial buying centers producing and marketing food and beverage products for industrial use in Belgium, France and Holland.

The model allows a comparison between the relative efficacy of product quality, service and sales quality as well as problem-solving in driving relationship satisfaction. The results demonstrate the relative effectiveness of sales team quality while also emphasizing the importance of problem-solving in building relationship satisfaction.

This study makes theoretical and empirical contributions providing a better understanding of the impact of service/product quality and problem-solving in building relationship satisfaction in a B2B context.

El propósito de este trabajo es fusionar los conceptos de servicio y calidad del producto, las capacidades de resolución de problemas y la satisfacción relacional en un modelo integrador y probar este modelo empíricamente en un contexto B2B.

Para contrastar las hipótesis propuestas se aplicó un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales, utilizando el enfoque LISREL, aplicado a una muestra de 1218 centros de compras industriales que producen y comercializan productos de alimentación y bebidas para uso industrial en Bélgica, Francia y Holanda.

El modelo permite una comparación de la eficacia relativa de la calidad del producto, la calidad del servicio y las ventas, así como la resolución de problemas en la construcción de la satisfacción relacional. Los resultados demuestran la efectividad relativa de la calidad del equipo de ventas, al tiempo que enfatizan la importancia de la resolución de problemas en la construcción de la satisfacción relacional.

Este estudio hace una contribución teórica y empírica para comprender mejor el impacto de la calidad del servicio / producto y la resolución de problemas en la construcción de la satisfacción relacional en un contexto B2B.

This paper aims to examine whether consumers respond differently to different types of eco-innovations and to explore how and under what conditions eco-friendly consumer innovativeness (ECI) impacts consumers’ perception and adoption intentions.

Two online experiments with real consumers in the USA were conducted to test the hypothesized relationships. Two eco-innovation products were examined: a connected vacuum cleaner (Study 1) and an innovative smartphone (Study 2).

First, consumers tend to express more positive product beliefs, higher preferences and stronger adoption intentions toward resource use elimination innovations compared with the other types of eco-innovations across two product categories. Although consumers are not willing to pay more, they would adjust their payment equity by increasing consumption levels for resource use elimination innovations. Second, this research demonstrates ECI affects adoption intentions via formulating consumer perceptions of product eco-friendliness. Perceived trade-offs between eco-friendly benefits and product effectiveness strengthens the positive effect of ECI while weakening the impact of perceived product eco-friendliness on adoption intentions.

Future studies may validate and extend the results for marketing communication to different types of eco-friendly innovative consumers to determine which marketing messages best match the perceptions and preferences of certain eco-friendly innovative consumers.

This study offers useful insights for strategic research-and-development investment and decision-making processes in selecting the best-suited approaches to developing eco-innovations and maximizing their success in the commercialization phase. Specifically, firms should place greater emphasis on resource use elimination innovation, which could evoke more positive consumer responses than resource use efficiency innovations and resource use substitution innovations. Moreover, it is important to improve the segmentation of the early adopters in the eco-innovation market with respect to specific types of eco-innovations so that marketers can distinctively address eco-friendly innovative consumers that best fit the potential user profile of their products.

The current research is novel as neither an empirically nor a theoretically founded framework has been suggested to examine how and why consumers respond differently to different types of eco-innovations. The findings shine new lights on eco-innovation research by providing useful insights into the underlying mechanisms and the conditions under which ECI affects consumers’ responses.

This study aims to develop and test a model of relationship selling management. It seeks to examine the impact of leadership quality and relationship selling, as antecedents of salespeople's relational behaviours, on sales effectiveness.

Starting from a review of literature, the model incorporates two classes of salespeople's relational behaviours, namely customer‐oriented selling (COS) and adaptive selling (AS), two classes of managerial antecedents (i.e. relationship selling strategy and LMX) and one consequence (sales effectiveness). The authors collected data from 164 sales manager‐salesperson dyads in a sample of French firms. A structural equation modelling approach was employed to test the hypotheses.

The findings show that relationship selling and LMX stimulate salespeople's relational behaviours, which in turn positively affect sales effectiveness. Moreover, the results reveal a positive impact of relationship selling on sales manager‐salesperson exchanges.

The study is cross‐sectional, and many other relevant constructs should be investigated in future research on the topic. Objective measures of performance may also be incorporated.

The study demonstrates that companies can stimulate desirable behaviours of salespeople, which drive to better performance, by leveraging on controllable organisational factors, i.e. selling strategy and leadership.

The research fills three important gaps in the extant literature. First of all, the study clearly sheds some light on the role played by specific organisational variables (e.g. leader‐member exchange quality) and behaviours of salespeople in implementing relational strategies. Second, the study shows that the quality of the relationship between supervisors and salespeople can affect specific behaviours of subordinates. Third, the paper contributes to a better understanding of organisational drivers of customer‐oriented selling and adaptive selling, and finds evidence of a positive impact of such behaviours on sales effectiveness.

Although sales managers influence to a great extent their salespeople's outcomes, research examining the impact of leadership effectiveness and learning orientation in the sales department is limited. As such, an investigation of the impact of sales managers' learning values and leadership – on the grounds of goal‐setting and leader‐member exchange (LMX) theories – on salespeople's goal orientation and performance is warranted. This paper aims to investigate these issues.

To explore these issues, the author presents the extant literature on learning orientation, goal orientation and leadership quality, in an effort to provide the basis for the development of theoretical propositions. A strategic learning pathway is proposed for further research indicating that sales managers' learning orientation and leadership affect salespeople's goal orientation and performance.

Each of the underlying propositions is explored and managerial and research implications are identified. The proposed model indicates that it is vital for sales managers to pursue strategic learning and create favourable learning conditions and processes that facilitate organisational learning and change.

The research framework provides a new perspective to sales managers for strategic implementation of learning practices in the sales environment.

The purpose of this study is to establish a theoretical basis for evaluating a strategic increase in customers' perceptions of service/product quality – specifically in terms of an increase in relationship quality and customer loyalty in a B2B environment – and to test this theoretical basis empirically.

Drawing on the relationship‐marketing literature, the authors empirically test a model of business loyalty in a sample of 234 advertising agencies' clients.

Using the Grönroos conceptualisation, a clear pattern of service‐quality dimensions is established and several important findings are reported – including empirical verification of the mediating role of overall relationship satisfaction in the formation of loyalty attributes. The effects of trust and commitment are also verified.

Studies that model attitudinal as well as behavioural relationship outcomes have strong precedence in the relationship marketing area. Although in this study the “intentions” approach is followed rather than a behavioural one, the measurement of the real behaviour of industrial clients proves to be very difficult from a practical point‐of‐view.

In this service continuum, managers need to clearly define relationship development strategies, service provision policies and develop homogeneous service provision. Towards this direction, it is essential that firms communicate the service and product quality standards to partners so that differences in service provision can be avoided.

The study integrates the concepts of service/product quality, relationship satisfaction, trust, and commitment in a business‐loyalty model, demonstrating the benefits of investing in relationships based on trust and commitment.

Drawing on relevant literature, the authors empirically test a model of business loyalty in a sample of 234 clients of information systems suppliers, integrating the concepts of service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty. The study builds on recent advances in services marketing theory and assesses the relationships underlying the identified constructs in the specific industry. A clear pattern of service quality dimensions is established following the Grönroos conceptualisation. Several important findings are reported, including the empirical verification of the mediating role of industrial satisfaction in the formation of loyalty attributes. Industrial satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between accessibility and loyalty and partially mediates latent construct's relationship with technical assistance and delivery service. The results provide robust evidence concerning the direct effect of industrial satisfaction on loyalty. accessibility, delivery, and product reliability as antecedents of industrial satisfaction.

The increased digital interactions in the B2B industry have enhanced the importance of customer engagement as a measure of firm performance. This study aims to map and analyze temporal and spatial journeys for customer engagement in B2B markets from a bibliometric perspective.

The extant literature on customer engagement research in the B2B context was analyzed using bibliometric analysis. The citation analysis, keyword analysis, cluster analysis, three-field plot and bibliographic coupling were used to map the intellectual structure of customer engagement in B2B markets.

The research on customer engagement in the B2B context was studied more in western countries. The analysis suggests that customer engagement in B2B markets will take centre stage in the coming times as digital channels make it easier to track critical metrics besides other key factors. Issues like digital transformation, the use of artificial intelligence for virtual engagement, personalization, innovation and salesforce management by leveraging technology would be critical for improved B2B customer engagement.

The study provides a comprehensive reference to scholars working in this domain.

The study makes a pioneering effort to comprehensively analyze the vast corpus of literature on customer engagement in B2B markets for business insights.

The new teleworking conditions imposed by extreme events such as the COVID-19 pandemic blur the border between home and official working space, amplifying the conflicting demands of family and work life experienced by employees across national cultures. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study explores cross-national variances in the underlying mechanism of how family–work conflict (FWC) affects employees’ operational and marketing productivity in the global epidemic-induced teleworking context.

This study conducts a large-scale and cross-national survey of 710 remote employees who worked from home partially or fully during the COVID-19 outbreak across three countries: the USA, the UK and Vietnam.

The results show that FWC drives affective commitment, leading to greater employees’ operational and marketing productivity when teleworking. We also find distinct moderating effects of organizational factors (i.e. task control) and employees’ psychological factors (i.e. emotional exhaustion) on the FWC–operational productivity link across the three countries. Moreover, centralization positively moderates the effect of operational productivity on marketing productivity in the teleworking context in Vietnam, while it is not the case in the USA and the UK.

This study fills a gap in the literature by revealing cross-national differences in the underlying mechanism of the FWC effects on employees’ operational and marketing productivity in the pandemic-induced teleworking conditions. It extends extant studies in the work–family literature by introducing affective commitment as an important mediator in translating the negative consequences of FWC to operational and marketing productivity gain in crisis-driven teleworking across national cultures. We also provide insights into the distinct moderating roles of task control and emotional exhaustion in determining the FWC effect on operational productivity as well as that of centralization in driving marketing productivity. The findings have substantive implications for teleworking design and management to improve employee productivity across different national settings.

In the process of undertaking overseas construction projects, relational governance has become indispensable for project stakeholders. This study examines how relational governance influences contractors' adaptability to foreign situations and whether such associations are positively moderated by international environmental complexity.

A crosssectional survey methodology was applied to collect primary data through questionnaires sent to domestic contractors in China and South Korea (hereafter Korea). Multiple regression analysis was used to test the effects of four dimensions of relational governance on contractor adaptability. Thereafter, the Chinese and Korean subsamples were tested separately through moderated regression analysis to explore differences in the influence of relational governance on adaptability.

The results showed that quality communication, favor exchange and establishing an emotional relationship significantly and positively affected a contractor’s adaptability. However, there were significant differences between the Chinese and Korean international contractors in terms of the moderating effects of international environment complexity.

East Asian engagement in international development is not limited to China and Korea alone, and the study should be replicated using large representative samples from more countries, such as Japan, to gain a fuller understanding of the influence of relational governance.

The results have great significance for the managers of international contractors in East Asian countries and contribute to the research on relational governance and contractor adaptability.